


To Tread Upon Such Hollow Ground

by Rens_Knight



Series: Another Set of Eyes: A Star Wars Alternate Universe [6]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Literature, Sci-Fi, fan fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-23 03:42:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10711461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rens_Knight/pseuds/Rens_Knight
Summary: In the aftermath of the battle of Starkiller Base, General Leia Organa struggles to keep the Resistance in the fight for the fate of the galaxy.  Even more--a battle rages within her own spirit as the past, both the old and the new, refuse to be silent.  So too does the painful gift within her...the one she has spent her entire adult life trying to suppress.But how can one contend with that which onewill notknow?All the while,the seeds of a mystery take holdon the backwater world of Dantooine.  (Spoilers for Part 3 ofAnother Set of Eyes)





	To Tread Upon Such Hollow Ground

**"To Tread Upon Such Hollow Ground"**

_The ground rushes up to meet her--closer, closer, heaving...it's cracking open--the planet is cracking apart, this gutted crystalline sphere--_

_\--no.  This isn't that_ _place--_ that place _\--the last place anyone ever saw him alive...saw him--_ which him-- _damn him, bless him.  He_ took him _\--damn it,_ which one _, the thief or the murderer, the black hole or the wild spinning magnetar full of searing rays and tearing itself down to its constituent particles...!_

 _Yet still there is that sense that_ something _has shifted, that gravity no longer pulls straight down.  There is something else out there, something strange, inevitable, something alien that does not know her, cannot see her, but is_ there _nonetheless.  And it is not_ her _sight that matters.  For in that moment as the ground beneath her spins and shifts as if hills are become waves underfoot, all she knows is that in this moment, everything has changed.  Yet everything remains the same.  The remnants of all she once held dear--somewhere deep inside where she dare not let herself remember for the sake of her first and truest love, yes, even when he left at least it was back into_ himself _and not into the treacherous abyss..._

 _A frozen stillness overtakes the twisting valley between green-topped, ancient mountains.  She_ has _to remember now, even though the remembering killed the one she loved the most._

_The most.  So she admits it.  It's true now: the flame within her flickers under a frigid and soulless wind, no longer what it once was...could be again?_

_What price, hope...what foolishness, faith..._

_Yet the world has shifted; what rivers of time and destiny once flowed in a direction perceived as fixed are now compelled to flow another way uncharted.  For better or for ill she knows not for sure save for the one hope that what was before now must take at least_ some _form not accounted for under the previous shape of things..._

_Nothing has changed._

_Nothing remains the same._

_Everything shatters--  
_

**One month after the destruction of Starkiller Base  
Undisclosed Location**

****General Leia Organa paced through the underbelly of the base under dimmed and flickering lights, weak of body, but her mind ever so terribly, burningly alive.  True, if she were being completely practical, she would force herself back to bed instead of wandering vacant corridors in the dead of the night shift.  She would have done her part in that way, to conserve energy--both her own and that of the base.

They had to run everything on minimal power here, their forlorn outpost tucked away inside the outer debris belt of a dying star ( _another given life_ ) on a world barely even large enough to be called that instead of a mere chunk of dirty ice in the forgotten reaches of space.  The Resistance couldn't give him-- _them_ \--another true planet to target--they had to hide in places like this when it was time to be still, moving back and forth whenever someone needed distracting, long enough, they hoped, to give Luke time enough to do whatever the hell he was going to do--

Assuming he _was_ even going to do anything, damn him-- _damn him_ for running, did that _monstrosity_ out there suck the life out of _his_ spirit, too?

She knew she was supposed to love him--her brother.  But it was _so hard_ sometimes.  He let that vile creature take her boy, he let _her boy_ take her husband, while he ran off on some foolish quest that looked a whole hell of a lot more like cutting and running, turning his back on everything and everybody, especially the _consequences_ the whole rest of this mirthless galaxy had to suffer through...

She was supposed to love Luke--but the love ran slow and tepid at best.

She was supposed to revile her son, disown him as unworthy of the name he'd tossed aside as callously as yesterday's trash-- _just like he did her truest love_.  And on paper...General Organa had.  She'd finally signed the documents she'd refused to touch for all these years, the day after she knew, the day after she _felt_ the truth, that her husband, her beloved, Han Solo, was dead: the papers that left everything she owned, every decision to be made in the event of her incapacity or death, to Chewbacca, and Chewbacca alone.  Ben Solo...he no longer mattered, a broken bridge on the way to...nowhere.  Alderaan was dead, and finally too its line, surrendered into the hands of its own destroyer.

She knew she was supposed to despise Ben.  That's what all of her followers out there wanted, to rally against the dread figure.  She--curse her!--she _wanted_ to return everything he'd thrown at her, every last measure.  Yet some small portion she still held back despite herself, despite everything.

And this tangled mess of mutilated love and crippled hate--it writhed and slithered within her veins and her nerves, driving her to shuffle morosely down the vacant halls instead of sleeping, not knowing what the hell it was she intended to accomplish except that it involved _doing something_ to atone for the sickness borne of her blood.  _Anything_ other than facing the useless nightmares that only served to drive her into inaction if she let herself dwell on them too much.  The very inaction that served _them_ , just as it had when all of her warnings about the enemy went unheeded.

Too late.  No way but forward.

General Organa had a Resistance base to keep alive and in the fight, and that was that.  She marched towards the command center now, trying to somehow will away the bags under her eyes.  She squared her shoulders, straightened her back as far as her diminutive stature would allow, and stared straight ahead, her stony gaze practically challenging anyone in her path to make one single remark about her alleged state of exhaustion.  That sort of weakness she could not allow.  Not for the eyes of her comrades--and certainly not for the eyes of any First Order moles that had insinuated themselves into Resistance ranks.  What they had to see was General Organa, unbroken, indomitable, untouched by the treason of father and son, or the abandonment by her brother.  Undefeated by the murder of her husband.  Impervious.  That, and that alone, was the word she had to allow to escape to the rest of the galaxy.

And the Force?  Yes, it was out there to be observed and listened to, but its rule ended here with her.  She would not present herself as an empty conduit to whatever or _whoever_ might fill it.  No--Leia Organa would stand on her _own_ strength alone.  _That_ , imperfect though it might be where no one else could see, she could better know and better trust.

_A tendril of something from outside tentatively wove itself within her thoughts...wondering, yearning, drawing tight--_

_GO AWAY!_ she screamed at the inward echo of the past as she marched.  _It hurts, IT HURTS!_   She didn't want to even _think_ of that anymore.  Those damned five-dimensional memories, if only she had never known them at all--

 _The sting of fear, confusion, and betrayal in the instant when the panic ripped through her and she pushed the tiny, seeking presence away...and two sets of tears, each shed where the other could never see_ \--

Tears stung at the corners of Leia's eyes unseen, even now.  Damn it, there was no expunging this, even after she had felt how blood ties through the Force came to an end.  She wouldn't.  She... _couldn't_.  She sniffed back once, hard.  The only help for this was the same as for the nightmares: fight on.  Fight on.  No time to think about, much less _feel_ all of this yet again.

" _Ahh, General Organa!_ " a feminine, mechanical voice erupted from the base's inner sanctum as she scanned herself through the last door into the secured area.  " _I was considering alerting you before the end of your sleep cycle!  But I see I must have miscalculated which cycle you were following._ "

The general just barely bit back the acrid remark that leapt to the tip of her tongue; even protocol droids, their function aside, tended to be more than a little bit oblivious when it came to sentient emotions.  It wasn't their fault.  "What is it, PZ?" she asked the blue-plated, Rodian-built droid, PZ-4C0.

The droid sauntered forward, datapad clutched tight in her hand.  " _You told me to label any sightings of the Knights of Ren as high priority, ma'am._ "

Her stomach clenched tight against itself.  _Oh, Force, not now, not when it's getting so damned hard to bear the weight of all of this!_   And worse--far worse than that--was the fact that she had absolutely no idea what to expect...what to even _want_ to hear, beside the deep and terrible _nothing_ that had filled the void between the destruction of Starkiller Base ( _a new star ignites_ ) and now.  She drew in a deep breath, forced as much of the anguish as she could out of her voice, not that it really mattered when it was just her and PZ.  "All right," she ordered as resolutely as she could.  "Give me the bad news."

" _It's from the Dantooine incursion, ma'am.  Our asset in the area confirms that the Star Destroyer sighted in orbit was the_ Finalizer."

That was it: the First Order's mighty flagship, unseen since the destruction ( _creation_ ) of Starkiller Base ( _red dwarf, more lasting power than many of the stars in this galaxy, more capable of supporting life than its crimson twilight would suggest_ ).  Even in the lightning raids the First Order had staged since the loss of their greatest--known--weapon, the _Finalizer_ had had yet to re-emerge until now.  This was General Hux's ship.  And... _his_ ship.  For a terrible moment, he existed within Leia in two states at once, his fate yet to be determined until the results were read, the final words were spoken.

She had to hear it.  She _had_ to force herself to hear _all_ of it, no matter how ugly the truth became.  She could not _ever_ retreat from the cold, hard facts, or her leadership--and more importantly, the strength and resolve of the Resistance itself--would fall into dangerous doubt.  "Tell me about the battle," she demanded.  "All of it, including whatever...sighting...there was."

" _The main focus of the raid was on the planet's two main towns--the local governing body classifies them as 'cities'--of New Garang and New Khoonda, mainly TIE strafing runs aimed at planetary defense installations on the ground._ "

"Casualties?"

" _Resistance X-Wings deployed to the sector suffered thirty percent casualties.  However, the native Dantooinian Guard suffered near_ _total loss of flight-capable defensive infrastructure.  A squadron of Dantooinian Guard fighters scrambled just before the attack run on Khoonda Base Besh, and three of the hyperdrive-capable craft were unaccounted for in the immediate aftermath of the battle.  There was no sign of of their transponders, no images of them in satellite footage, and no indications of them in the orbital battle debris.  It is believed that these three ships jumped into hyperspace near the end of the battle when it was clear that nearly the entire Dantooinian Guard space force had been destroyed in their launch pods.  They likely returned out of satellite view once the_ Finalizer _was gone and hid in off-scanner locations such as subterranean or sublunar cave systems._ "

General Organa gave a dispassionate nod: the Guard survivors' move had not been cowardice, but tactical sense once the Dantooinians realized that not only had their fighter force been decimated, but there simply was _no_ practical way for them to do anything more than scratch the paint job on that gargantuan Star Destroyer.  _Something_ had to survive to fight another day, for the Dantooinians had always been smart enough to know that official help from the New Republic would never come for them in any other form than hot air.  

" _The rest of Dantooine's fighter force never made it off the ground_ ," PZ reiterated.  " _And approximately thirty percent of ground-based surface-to-space missiles survived the attack._ "  Missiles...better than nothing, but those could be shot down on the way up.  And it was a long way up.  Unless Dantooine's enemies dipped into the atmosphere, cutting their reaction time down to something small enough for the missiles to actually take something out before themselves being locked onto and blown to bits, the small colony had virtually no remaining defenses against invasion.  "What about troop landings?" she pressed.  "Did they attempt any kind of holding action?"

" _Minimal_ ," PZ-4C0 replied." _Six Stormtrooper transports were split between two locations to capture Dantooinian and Resistance prisoners of war, presumably for intelligence-gathering purposes judging from actions witnessed on the surface_."  Leia shuddered.  _Please don't say it, please don't say it_ , she wished.  She knew exactly what _that_ could mean.  Poe and Rey-- _they_ knew even more than she did.  " _One landing occurred outside Khoonda Base Aurek, the other in a rural agrarian village in the mid-latitudes where a Resistance fighter crash-landed.  That's where our source obtained a confirmed sighting--corroborated by both eyewitness accounts and surveillance footage_."

Leia stifled a pained groan.  "What about the pilot?"

" _Captured by First Order forces_ ," the protocol droid confirmed.

"Is that what this...footage is of?"

The red lights that formed PZ's eyes flickered in negation.  " _No, ma'am.  The footage was obtained from a medical practice, and not one the lost pilot ever entered.  I checked the reports and the footage several times, ma'am--it is...odd, unsettling, if I may take the liberty of a human description, but unmistakably authentic_."

General Organa folded her arms over her chest, pressing her lips together in a moment of baleful silence.  She knew what she had to do, but the thought of actually _doing_ it...there was no hiding from it.  "Show me."

The droid ambled over to the center console, switching on the two-dimensional display and transmitting her clearance codes and instructions.  A still image flickered to life, peering down at the floor of the tiny, darkened infirmary, which was bathed in an eerie combination of street lights and distant fires that streamed in through the front windows.  " _Kylo Ren was sighted at this location_ ," PZ confirmed as she set the silent footage into motion.

The medic jumped at some unheard sound and then she sprang to her feet, scalpel clutched in hand, trembling yet standing her ground with her useless defense as _he_ stormed in--ragged cowl, black surcoat and armorweave, and that damned infernal mask back over his face as if it had never left it.  The scalpel dropped--unwillingly, to judge from the pain and anger writ across the woman's face.  _He_ pushed forward, flanked by Stormtroopers--she stood her ground until he shoved her violently into a chair, hand reaching forward towards her face as he knelt, mask just inches from her nose--

The remnants of Leia's dinner nearly exploded up from her stomach.  An interrogation of Force, her flesh and blood knelt there onscreen, driving deep into the depth of an innocent woman's mind...!  The woman's eyes flew open wide, vacant almost, yet _seeing_ far, far too much as they fixed upon that heartless visor staight ahead.  Her mouth gaped at first as if to scream, and then-- _how?  How?!_ Her hands whipped forward like lightning, latching onto his wrist--ice ran through Leia's veins as she watched--but the Stormtroopers _yielded_ , lowering their blasters.  Commanded.  They _had_ to have been.  The woman's breathing steadied somewhat, but that _stare_ only deepened until suddenly both of them rocked back as if pushed and the one to whom she gave birth whipped a hand forward and the woman fell unconscious, he threw her over his shoulder and stalked away at a high-speed march...

_\--the ground is shifting--hollow.  Shifting, flowing in another, unaccustomed way...and there's something about the convergence of flickering shadows on this unstable ground--_

_Nothing has changed._

_Nothing remains the same._

__"... _ma'am?  Ma'am?_ "  The general felt the droid's hand on her shoulder, gently shaking it.  Leia's own hand whipped out with the same unseeing, instinctive immediacy as the woman whose form had now faded offscreen, to brace herself on the console.  " _Are you quite all right?  Do you require medical attention?_ "

General Organa shook her head.  For a second, the world spun a bit further than it ought to.  She forced the sensation down.  "No, no...it's just something I dreamed a few nights ago.  Nothing important.  I'll be fine.  I _am_ fine."  She waved the droid off, straighening herself by force.  Nonetheless, a question flew out of her mouth.  "Remind me again, how many days ago was the raid exactly, PZ?"

" _Two point five two days, ma'am_ ," PZ-4C0 reported.  " _Do you prefer a higher degree of precision?_ "

"No, that's quite enough," Leia murmured...in the middle of the night, three attempts at sleep ago, counting tonight's failure.  The night she woke up convinced that _something_ had slipped sideways, that one path had shifted into another...Leia drew in a deep and shuddering breath, closing her eyes and letting that cursed Force exist at the forefront of her consciousness for just a moment.

_Alive.  Alive.  In some way...alive.  This is not the end._

_The pattern is not as it was_ before _, when things were as they should have been.  And not...exactly as it has been since, though the difference is a mystery to her.  Something in the threads that weave in and out of the still-strangled shape..._

_Alive.  Unchanged.  Different._

__"Why?" she muttered, half to herself, half to PZ, half to the universe and the Force itself, as she shoved it back into the background.  "What did he want-- _why_?"

" _Our asset does not know_ ," the droid replied.  " _The individual in this footage was never returned to Dantooine and has been declared missing, presumed prisoner of the First Order.  What is known from eyewitness accounts is that Kylo Ren queried her for information regarding the Resistance pilot, but after the initial inquiry, nothing else was heard.  It is believed she was subjected to some form of hypnosis before succumbing to unconsciousness_."  'Succumbing'--the word felt wrong somehow--something had _happened_ in that room before that, if she could trust her eyes, but General Organa couldn't be sure, and it wasn't worth stopping PZ from getting this dreadful report overwith.  " _Whatever transpired, Kylo Ren chose to leave after that.  He and his Stormtroopers withdrew from the medical practice with no direct casualties other than the abduction_."

The general raised an eyebrow.  "'Direct' casualties?"

" _Yes, ma'am.  A fifty-four year old human male died as a result of the cessation of medical treatment caused by the abduction of the medic.  Additionally, a thirty-nine year old female arrived at the medical practice approximately ten minutes after the abduction took place and subsequently died due to the unavailability of aid despite the attempts of the walking wounded to stabilize her.  However, these are not classified as direct casualties of the Knights of Ren because no executions took place within the medical practice._ "

General Organa nodded mutely at the news.  Not like Tuanul on Jakku, then-- _he_ had gotten what he was after, perhaps?  Or...no?  Then why the lack of reprisals for failure to yield the information he sought, or for perceived collaboration with the New Republic enemy, as in being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

All they _really_ knew was this: out there in the Outer Rim on a world called Dantooine, another family mourned for their missing child.  Feared that she would never come home.  Felt themselves being torn apart by the _not knowing_.

_Gravity reoriented--river diverted--shadows interwoven as the ground spins and gives way--_

_Nothing has changed._

_And nothing remains the same._  


**Author's Note:**

> (Soundtrack: ["A Necessary End"](http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEvby-c1WnI) by Saltillo / [menton3](http://menton3.deviantart.com) )
> 
> I leave you all with this one final quote to ponder:
> 
> "The finest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist." --Charles Baudelaire


End file.
